Happy Birthday, iPhone

30 June 2017

There’s only been one iPhone generation that I wasn’t part of: the first. In the UK the iPhone was only available on o2 and I was with T-Mobile. That fact, coupled with my contract renewal time-frame, meant that I upgraded to a different phone: LG Viewty.

While the rest of the world wishes the iPhone a happy birthday, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts about the LG Viewty.

The front of the phone was OK, while the back of the phone was hideous: the camera lens was huge but, to be fair, it did take really good pictures. It also had 120fps video and direct upload to YouTube (in 2007). The camera, in retrospect, was way ahead of its time.

The back panel of the phone was removable. The reason I know this was that mine was faulty and kept falling off. The whole phone had to be sent for repair for three weeks and during this time I was given a loaner feature phone with capacity for 100 text messages.

Anyway, while the Viewty’s operating system was LG’s, the user interface was an Adobe Flash variant…so it was unresponsive and buggy. The Viewty also came with a stylus and I used it maybe three times. Tapping buttons provided haptic feedback, but because it was a resistance based touchscreen you had to put in effort, and have patience, before said feedback was felt and your tap was registered.

After about three months I gave up with the Viewty and sold it on eBay. For the remainder of my contract I used a Sony Ericsson W580 that I bought in a rage from Argos.